1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to profiling and more particularly to a system and method which employs progressive refinement to determine a number of occurrences of small ranges of addresses or numbers within a much larger range to determine patterns and detect distribution.
2. Description of the Related Art
Profiling includes detecting patterns and measuring distributions. Profiling (e.g., timer-driven address sampling) when a range of addresses, numbers, etc. is large, the desired resolution is high, or the ranges of possible hot spots are not known in advance, is a difficult task. A standard linear histogram approach would require an unreasonable amount of space.
A binary search tree organization (e.g., splay or splice) may be a possibility when hits occur in a bounded number of bins (whose addresses may be unpredictable), but breaks down (e.g., with excessive storage consumption) when there are many scattered addresses with single (or a small number) of hits. A hash-based organization has similar properties.